The Case of the Aggarwal Cross

One day, the pots fell down.

I was away, in another country, so far from home that if I tried to get any further I would be on the way back. To inform me about the pots, I was sent an evocative photograph of the broken pots in a dustbin and the poetic caption: “Matki phooti”.

‘Matki phooti’ is a philosophical koan derived from a song of the 15^th century mystic poet Kabir, which translates roughly to:

It’s such a good thing that my pot broke. 

Now I don’t have to fill water any more.

About the pots: I had painted a range for a charity bazaar many years – a decade or more – previously and these were the ones I’d kept for myself. If I had ever taken Marie Kondo on an inspection around my house, it would have been a long and busy inspection, but the pots would have been retained. Now they were gone.

Back at home, I found that the garbage collection team had left quite a few of the shards in a corner of the garden.The idea of making a collage emerged from a lovely artefact I had seen in a corner of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in the old town of Panama City, these days a trendy area with night life and boutiques and all. I never asked about the significance of the pottery shards arranged thus when I saw it, but was so charmed that, looking at my photos of the trip, decided to give it a shot. So on a day when I had the house to myself, I gathered up the broken bits and pasted them onto some tiles, stoically employing a shoe to flatten them so that they would stick nicely.

Once the Aggarwal Cross was ready, I started preparing to proudly display it in a prominent place outside the house. 

However, the precocious author of the ‘matki phooti’ response now had another penetrating observation about these goings on: “It’s a good thing nani isn’t ever going to see this!” 

Everyone turned various shades of pale. My mother, whose family had been displaced from their homeland – summarily exiled from their home province – by the events following the Partition of India in 1947 when she was a child, had always been a proud Hindu very sensitive to the slightest hint of religious conversion. What would she have felt about having such a large cross, no matter how pretty, outside our home?

In the end, my gorgeous cross was relegated to a place where nobody is ever going to see it. I myself hadn’t gone to worship at it for several months and now, looking at its bits and pieces am suffused with a sense of satisfaction. Partly for having turned from regret to creativity; partly for having produced a work of art; partly for the symbolic juxtaposition of broken bits, such as placing a worshipper right in its heart.